Europe may witness the triumph of politics over economics

By Shlomo Ben-Ami

Economics, particularly economic theories, always yields in the end to political imperatives. That is why Europe’s fast-changing political landscape, reshaped by electoral insurrections in France and Greece against German-backed fiscal austerity, is bound to affect Europe’s economic policies as well.

Such an imperative has been at work throughout Europe’s postwar history. Europe’s shift from the modest customs union of the European Economic Community to the single market and common currency of today’s European Monetary Union was itself a fundamentally political move — one with strategic implications, of course. France wanted to tame German power by harnessing it to the European project, and Germany was prepared to sacrifice the Deutsche Mark for the sake of France’s acceptance of a united Germany, the nightmare of Europe’s recent past.

An economically robust Germany is, without doubt, vital to the European project, if only because history has shown how dangerous an unhappy Germany can be. Indeed, it was thanks to the euro — and the captive European market that goes with it — that Germany today is the world’s second-leading exporter (China surpassed it in 2009).

Europe, however, has always found it difficult to come to terms with an over-confident, let alone arrogant, Germany. The current political turmoil in Europe shows that, regardless of how sensible German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s austerity prescriptions for debt-ridden peripheral Europe might be in the abstract, they resemble a German Diktat. The concern for many is not just Europe’s historic “German problem,” but also that Germany could end up exporting to the rest of Europe the same ghosts of radical politics and violent nationalism that its economic success has transcended at home.

Once the crisis became a sad daily reality for millions of unemployed — particularly for what appears to be a lost generation of young, jobless Europeans — EU institutions also became a target of popular rage. Their inadequacies — embodied in a cumbersome system of governance and in endless, inconclusive summitry — and their lack of democratic legitimacy are being repudiated by millions of voters throughout the continent.

Europe’s experience has shown that the subordination of society to economic theories is politically untenable. Social vulnerability and frustration at the political system’s failure to provide solutions are the grounds upon which radical movements have always emerged to offer facile solutions.

A concomitant of such Kurzschluss between mainstream leaders and voters has always been the politics of accentuated ethnic identity, ultra-nationalism, and outright bigotry. Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy ended up trying desperately to appeal to those very sentiments in his last-ditch effort to avert his political demise.

What we have seen across Europe of late is a rebellion of voters against mainstream politics. In the first round of the French presidential elections, the extreme right and left received more than 30 percent of the vote, with Marine Le Pen’s anti-EU National Front threatening to supplant the center-right Union for a Popular Movement as the country’s new mainstream rightist party. In Greece, the party system’s dangerous fragmentation into a range of smaller groups, combined with the robust emergence of a new anti-austerity left, Alexis Tsipras’s Syriza, and a neo-Nazi right, has plunged governance into to a state of total paralysis.